Echeria Coli Co-Opted To Make Gasoline

Flask_Man writes "Technology Review has an article about a small biotech company in the Silicon Valley that has successfully produced renewable gasoline from genetically modified bacteria, including the nefarious E.Coli bacteria. A pilot plant is slated to be constructed in California in 2008, and it is claimed that hundreds of different hydrocarbon molecules are capable of being produced. The modified bacteria make and excrete hydrocarbon molecules that are the length and molecular structure the company desires. From the article: 'To do this, the company is employing tools from the field of synthetic biology to modify the genetic pathways that bacteria, plants, and animals use to make fatty acids, one of the main ways that organisms store energy. Fatty acids are chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms strung together in a particular arrangement, with a carboxylic acid group made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen attached at one end. Take away the acid, and you're left with a hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel.'" We discussed something similar to this earlier this year.

Comments

Curious...

[Lumpy]

So how do they get past the fact that e.Coli dies in gasoline? how did they change the bug to have a higher tolerance to their new unnatural excretions?

If you can keep the bugs alive in the media and the desired product then your output will be far higher than when the bugs end up killing themselves quickly.

Re:So this is what

[TheRaven64]

Some random maths:

The US uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day.

A refinery produces roughly 20 gallons of gasoline per barrel, giving 400 million gallons of gasoline per day.

Per year, this works out at 146 billion gallons.

At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs.

According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.

In order to meet the current needs of the USA, 3% of the landmass would have to be dedicated to growing fuel crops. I might have missed a significant figure somewhere here, because this seems like a much smaller amount than I would have guessed.